Kathy Greethurst talks about getting ideas for writing
Summary of video
Kathy does three main things to generate ideas.
First, because she’s a poet as well as an academic writer, she uses creative writing techniques, such as morning pages. What that means is that immediately on waking up she writes three sides of A4 paper of automatic writing, which is about dumping down whatever she's got in her head onto pieces of paper, which then allows her to have a flow of new ideas coming in. The point of morning pages is to write rubbish, ranting, whatever’s on your mind, but once you clear the negativity it allows space for new ideas. The idea is not to reread them, and to either throw them away or put them in a drawer. Kathy has about 10 books of this morning pages filed away in the drawer.
Second, if she’s stuck for ideas, Kathy takes her dog out for a walk in the countryside. This helps to generate ideas and to clarify her thoughts, and if she needs to, she talks ideas out loud as well, because there’s no one there except the dog.
Thirdly, she reads a lot. This is as part of research process, but she also reads a lot of different things, which tends to help the ideas to crystallise. She can be doing quite mundane tasks when the ideas come to her and then she just jots them down in a notebook.
